Spending hours with a PlayStation or an Xbox every day can lead to serious psychiatric problems in children -- but "pathological" video game playing may not be just a result of preexisting mental disorders, researchers reported.
A two-year prospective study of more than 3,000 children identified several baseline psychological factors such as impulsivity that predicted excessive video game playing, according to Douglas Gentile, PhD, of Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, and colleagues.
Nevertheless, such conditions as depression, social difficulties, and poor school performance "seemed to act as outcomes of pathological gaming," Gentile and co-authors wrote online in Pediatrics.
"Pathological gaming seems not to be simply secondary to other disorders but to predict poorer functioning longitudinally, and it can last for several years," they added.
For their study, the researchers gave questionnaires to 3,034 elementary and middle-school children in Singapore from 2007 to 2009. The survey, conducted in the students' classrooms, asked age-appropriate questions to elicit information on video gaming habits, social interactions, decision-making skills, affect, and other aspects of their psychiatric status as well as school performance.
Gentile and colleagues noted that response patterns indicated that causation could go in both directions for some factors.
"For example, although impulsivity is a risk factor for becoming a pathological gamer, impulsivity worsens after a youth becomes a pathological gamer," they wrote.
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